Ryan to Obama: 'Put up or shut up'

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — Speaking south of Fort Bragg military base here, Paul Ryan said the White House should “put up or shut up” and lay out just how painful the sequester will be.

“The House has already passed, as well as the Senate, which has now been finally signed into law, bipartisan legislation saying, ‘Put up or shut up,’” Ryan told more than 100 people here. “The president needs to show us how he plans on putting this in place if he is not going to help us pass legislation preventing it in the first place, so we’re now waiting for that answer.”

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The bill Ryan referred to — the Sequestration Transparency Act — was signed into law by President Barack Obama earlier this month. It requires the Obama administration to send Congress a report within 30 days on its plan for $1.2 trillion in cuts to domestic and defense programs that will take place at the start of 2013 if Congress is unable to agree on another deficit-reduction plan before the end of the year.

While sequestration has been hotly debated in Washington, the automatic defense cuts loom here in Fayetteville, a military town that is home to the 82nd Airborne, the Army Reserve Command and Forces Command and Joint Special Operations Command, as well as major contracting companies.

“Everybody here knows what a sequester is now. It used to be an arcane budget term,” Ryan said, underscoring the political back-and-forth that locals say would devastate their livelihood.

But Obama isn’t the only one likely to get the blame from voters if sequestration sets in — it was part of a deal that Congress agreed to in exchange for a $2.4 trillion increase in the debt ceiling last summer.

Ryan did vote for the plan but insisted Thursday that during budget negotiations, it was “the president and his party leaders that insisted on this makeup, this formula. Defense spending is not half of all federal spending, but it’s half of the cuts approximately in the sequester. We disagreed with that then, and we disagree with it now.”

John Laub, an Army veteran who teaches Junior ROTC, said Fayetteville — nicknamed “Fayette-nam” for its large military presence — would be devastated by the $500 billion in automatic defense cuts that will take effect Jan. 2, 2013, if Congress can’t work out a deal.

“I’m concerned because I was stationed here at Fort Bragg three times. It’s a large part of this economy,” he told POLITICO. “Cuts not only impact the military, they impact the entire community — schools, businesses that help support the military. Any cuts are going to have a devastating impact on our community.”

He’s backing Mitt Romney and Ryan, he said, and isn’t worried that neither man has extensive foreign policy or national security experience and hasn’t served in the military.

“Doesn’t bother me at all. People can relate better to an organization if they’ve been in the organization before,” he told POLITICO. “But I think they are smart enough to listen to people in the military based on facts, not on political feelings.”

Ryan argued — as he has campaigning across the country this week — that a Romney-Ryan administration would “reverse these reckless, devastating defense cuts that the president is bringing us toward. We will recognize that the primary responsibility of the federal government first and foremost is a strong national defense. That’s something that Mitt Romney is extraordinarily committed to do.”

Men and women serving in the armed services, Ryan continued, “must have the security of knowing that the promises made to them are the promises that are going to be kept and must have everything at their backs to make sure that when they’re given a mission, that their government, that the Pentagon, that their Congress, that the president has their backs. We think that’s essential.”